Bolivia Guide
La Paz
Museo de Etnografía y Folklore
Set inside an elegant colonial mansion is the small but rewarding Museo de Etnografía y Folklore, housed in a seventeenth-century mansion built for the Marques de Villaverde, whose coat of arms looks down on the central patio from an exquisite mestizo-Baroque portico, complete with floral designs, parrots and feline figures. The mansion's street facade boasts the only surviving example of the elegant carved wooden balconies which were common in colonial La Paz.
Inside, the museum has exhibitions on two of Bolivia's most distinctive indigenous cultures. One room concentrates on the Chipayas, or Uros, a minority ethnic group which has been displaced from much of its territory by Aymara groups and now subsists on the watery margins of the great lakes of the southern Altiplano. The other focuses on the Quechua-speaking Tarabucos from the highlands east of Sucre, whose colourful striped ponchos and hats in the shape of the helmets of Spanish conquistadors are widely used to represent the "exoticism" of Bolivia to the outside world.